cj#709> Perspectives on Globalization (resend)

[previous posting had non-ascii character codes, hopefully
this version will be easier to read.]
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Although I have made a fortune in the financial
markets, I now fear that the untrammeled
intensification of laissez-faire capitalism and the
spread of market values into all areas of life is
endangering our open and democratic society. The main
enemy of the open society, I believe, is no longer the
communist but the capitalist threat.
- George Soros, Atlantic Monthly, February 1997
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The defining moment was the infamous Bretton Woods
meetings of 1944, at which the dominant ideologies of
globalization - accelerated growth through global free
trade and deregulation - were institutionalized. At
the opening session, U.S. Secretary of the Treasury
Henry Morgenthau advocated rapid "material progress on
an earth infinitely blessed with natural riches." He
asked participants to embrace the "elementary economic
axiom... that global prosperity has no fixed limits...
Thus Morgenthau set forth one of several underlying
assumptions of the economic paradigm that has guided
the globalization process since Bretton Woods. Two of
these assumptions are deeply flawed. The first is
that growth and enhanced world trade will benefit
everyone. The second is that growth will not be
constrained by the inherent limits of a finite planet.
By the end of this meeting, the World Bank and the
International Monetary Fund (IMF) were founded, and
the groundwork was laid for what later became the
General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). In the
intervening years, these Bretton Woods institutions
have held faithfully to their half-century-old
mandate. Through "structural adjustment programs,"
the World Bank and the I.M.F. have pressured countries
of the South to open their borders and convert their
economies from diverse production for local self-
sufficiency to export production for the global
market. Trade agreements like GATT reinforced these
actions, opened the global economy to the increasingly
free movement of goods and money, and eliminated
controls on corporate behavior.
...while the Bretton Woods institutions have met
their goals, they have failed in their purpose of
bringing prosperity to the people of the world. The
earth has more poor people today than ever before.
There is an accelerating gap between the rich and the
poor...
- David C Korten, The Nation, July 15/22, 1996
(author of When Corporations Rule the World)
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Economic globalization involves arguably the most
fundamental redesign and centralization of the
planet's political and economic arrangements since the
Industrial Revolution. Yet the profound implications
of these changes have barely been exposed to serious
public scrutiny or debate.
- Jerry Mander, The Nation, July 15/22, 1996
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The IMF-World Bank-sponsored macro-economic reforms
imposed on developing countries have been responsible
for the destruction of local level food self-
sufficiency and the outbreak of famine. World
agriculture has for the first time in history the
capacity to satisfy the food requirements of the
entire planet, yet the very nature of the global
market system prevents this from occurring. The
capacity to produce food is immense yet the levels of
food consumption remain exceedingly low because a
large share of the World's population lives in
conditions of abject poverty and deprivation.
- Michel Chossudovsky, The Causes of Global Famine
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A merger movement began in 1897 and peaked in 1904,
at which point more than 300 trusts existed in the
United States with an aggregate capitalization of
$7,249,343,500. This $7 billion represented a
staggering figure at the time, when even skilled,
well-paid workers in trade unions earned about $1,000
per year. During the first great merger wave of
1897-1904 one-third of all companies disappeared
through mergers...
The Senate functioned as an extension of the
business relationships that controlled state politics
because state legislatures elected U.S. senators, and
senators thereby owed their political power to various
moneyed interests..."Only a minority of the people of
the United States had any control over the United
States Senate. And that minority was interested in
its own predatory designs". (William Allen White)...
- Nell Irvin Painter,
Standing at Armageddon: The United States, 1877-1919
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Despite a ledger of laws against them and periodic
pledges by government and business leaders to crack
down, sweatshops have made a remarkable comeback in
America, evolving from a relative anomaly into a
commonplace, even indispensable, part of the U.S.
garment industry. - William Branigin
Washington Post, February 16 1997
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The fact that growth is achieved at the cost of
social stability is ignored. That is how the West has
destabilized the world. We have convinced ourselves
that there exists only one valid economic and social
model: our own. By attempting to impose it
universally, we have exported to almost every corner
of the world our diseases: crime, drugs, alcoholism,
family breakdown, civil disorder in urban slums,
accelerated abuse of the environment and all the other
problems that we experience daily.
In the United Kingdom, despite growth in GNP of 97
per cent, between 1961 and 1991 the number of those
living in poverty grew from 5.3 million to 11.4
million.
Global free trade has become a sacred principle of
modern economic theory, a sort of generally accepted
moral dogma. That is why it is so difficult to
persuade politicians and economists to reassess its
effects on a world economy which is changing
radically. The ultimate objective of global free
trade is to create a worldwide market in products,
services, capital and labour. Its instrument to
achieve this is GATT, the General Agreement of Tariffs
and Trade...If it is implemented, it will impoverish
and destabilize the industrialized world while at the
same time cruelly ravaging the third world.
- Sir James Goldsmith, The Trap
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...The Economist recently reported that five
companies now control more than 50 percent of the
global market in the following industries: consumer
durables, automotive, airlines, aerospace, electronic
components, electricity & electronics, and steel.
Five corporations control more than 40 percent of the
global market in oil, personal computers and -
especially alarming in its consequences for public
debate on these very issues - media. These companies
and others like them are the true beneficiaries of the
global economy.
- from remarks by David C Korten,
author of When Corporations Rule the World
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The wider the gap becomes between productive
capacity and realistic market demand, the more likely
it is that the collapse of optimism will be sharp and
shocking. ...This is the nature of catastrophe that the
global system is flirting with at present, I do not
presume to predict with certainty that it will occur,
much less when or how it might start. I do assert
that the risk is visible and large and that it is
growing. ...A frail basis for optimism lies in the fact
that these economic forces are not new to the world,
but have all been experienced before. Perhaps,
through conscientious self-knowledge, people can find
ways to avert tragedy. Perhaps.
- William Greider, One World Ready or Not
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She sits bestride the world like a Colossus; no
other power at any time in the world's history has
possessed so varied or so great an influence on other
nations...Half of the wealth of the world, more than
half of the productivity, nearly two-thirds of the
world machines are concentrated in American hands; the
rest of the world lies in the shadow of American
industry
- Robert Payne, British historian,
after visiting America in the winter of 1948-49
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Although the colonial empires have disappeared,
these dominant-subordinate economic relationships
persist as strongly as ever. The principal instrument
for economic control is the multinational corporation,
which is now playing the role formerly played by the
Hudson Bay and East India Companies.
- L.S. Stavrianos, The Promise of the Coming Dark Age
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[Nation] states are less likely to see threat
coming from states with which they are culturally
similar than they are to see threat coming from states
that are culturally different... the rivalry of the
super powers is in some measure replaced by the clash
of civilizations... a significant shift is underway in
the relative power of civilizations and their leading
or core states. The West has been the overwhelmingly
dominant civilization for centuries and will continue
to be that, quite definitely, well into the next
century.
- Samuel P. Huntington, remarks at the
Chicago Council on Foreign Relations
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...NATO is the security organization of Western
civilization and... its primary purpose is to defend and
preserve that civilization.
- Samuel P. Huntington,
Foreign Affairs, November/December 1996
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Transnational corporations now account for one-
third of global output; their global annual sales have
reached 4.8 trillion dollars, which is greater than
total international trade. The largest 100
multinational corporations control about one-third of
all foreign direct investment.* ("Elite companies
rule world of trade", Guardian, London, 31 August
1994) The globalization of the market is vital to
them, both to produce cheaply and to sell universally.
Because they do not necessarily owe allegiance to the
countries where they operate, there is a divorce
between the interests of the transnational
corporations and those of society.
...[The World Trade Organization (WTO)] is the
organization which is supposed to replace GATT,
regulate international trade, and lead us to global
economic integration. It is yet another international
bureaucracy whose functionaries will be largely
autonomous...America and every European nation will be
handing over ultimate control of its economy to an
unelected, uncontrolled, group of international
bureaucrats. - Sir James Goldsmith, The Trap
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Virtually unreported, the latest and potentially
most dangerous of these agreements is now under
negotiation at the Organization for Economic
Cooperation and Development (OECD). The purpose of
the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI), as the
proposed pact is known, is to grant transnational
investors the unrestricted 'right' to buy, sell and
move businesses, and other assets, wherever they want,
whenever they want. To achieve this goal, the MAI
would ban a wide range of regulatory laws now in force
around the globe and preempt future efforts to hold
transnational corporations and investors accountable
to the public. The agreement's backers (the United
States and the European Union) intend to seek assent
from the 29 industrial countries that comprise the
OECD and then push the new accord on the developing
world.
- Scott Nova and Michelle Sforza-Roderick,
Preamble Center for Public Policy, Washington, D.C.
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Is the Trilateral Commission a conspiracy? No more
than the laws of capitalism conspire to assert
themselves. The Trilateral Commission is the
executive advisory committee to transnational finance
capital... The vistas of the Trilateral Commission can
be understood as the ideological perspective
representing the transnational outlook of the
multinational corporation, which seeks to subordinate
territorial politics to non-territorial economic
goals.
- Richard Falk, The Yale Law Review, April 1975
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The Trilateral Commission doesn't secretly run the
world. The Council on Foreign Relations does that.
- Winston Lord, President, CFR
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[There] is looming up a new and dark power... the
enterprises of the country are aggregating vast
corporate combinations of unexampled capital, boldly
marching, not for economical conquests only, but for
political power... The question will arise and arise in
your day, though perhaps not fully in mine, which
shall rule - wealth or man; which shall lead - money
or intellect; who shall fill public stations -
educated and patriotic freemen, or the feudal serfs of
corporate capital...
- Edward G. Ryan, Chief Justice of Wisconsin's Supreme Court,
from an 1873 address to the graduating class
of the University of Wisconsin Law School
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History teaches us that every oppressed class must
gain liberation through its own efforts.
- Emma Goldman, Populist Era activist
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As for reportage about corporations themselves, the
media treat corporate figures mainly as glamourous
celebrities and speak respectfully in the new language
of consolidation - efficiency, structural engineering
and downsizing... The media have still less to say about
global media corporations that place Rupert Murdoch,
Ted Turner and very few others in a position to
transmit their Western images and commercial values
directly into the brains of 75 percent of the world's
population...
- Jerry Mander, The Nation, July 15/22, 1996
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Americans and their allies surely did not win the
Cold War in order to cede sovereignty over national
economic policy to Motorola and Daimler-Benz, Toyota
and Goldman Sachs. ...The political task, therefore, is
tricky: to re-create a national governance that
asserts its power to regulate players in the global
market and yet, at the same time, recognizes the
necessity of embracing the internationalist
perspective. - William Greider,One World Ready or Not
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There is, of course, no reason why the new
totalitarianisms should resemble the old. Government
by clubs and firing squads, by artificial famine, mass
imprisonment and mass deportation, is not merely
inhuman (nobody cares much about that nowadays); it is
demonstrably inefficient and in an age of advanced
technology, inefficiency is the sin against the Holy
Ghost. A really efficient totalitarian state would be
one in which the all-powerful executive of political
bosses and their army of managers control a population
of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they
love their servitude. To make them love it is the
task assigned, in present-day totalitarian states, to
ministries of propaganda, newspaper editors and school
teachers... - Aldous Huxley
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The fall of communism can be regarded as a sign
that modern thought... has come to a final crisis.
This era has created the first global, or planetary,
technical civilization, but it has reached the limit
of its potential, the point beyond which the abyss
begins...Man's attitude to the world must be radically
changed. We have to abandon the arrogant belief that
the world is merely a puzzle to be solved, a machine
with instructions for use waiting to be discovered, a
body of information to be fed into a computer in the
hope that sooner or later it will spit out a universal
solution... - Vaclav Havel,
former President, Checkloslovakia
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The values needed for survival, if one reflects on
it, turn out to be the familiar democratic values
preached by prophets and sages since the beginning of
history -- respect for human dignity, justice,
frugality, honesty, moderation, and equality. These
values will not come to replace the contemporary
outmoded values - competitive individualism, comfort,
waste, infinite growth, and security through
accumulation - because human beings suddenly learn
altruism. They will come to be the dominant values of
the coming century, if at all, only if enough people
are awakened to their necessity for the survival of
the species.
- Barnet, Richard J. and Ronald E. Muller,
Global Reach: The Power of the Multinational Corporations
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...Can't add my name into the fight when I'm gone
And I won't be laughing at the lies when I'm gone
And I can't question how or when or why when I'm gone
Can't live proud enough to die when I'm gone
So I guess I'll have to do it while I'm here.
-Phil Ochs, When I'm Gone
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Posted by Richard K. Moore - •••@••.••• - PO Box 26 Wexford, Ireland
http://www.iol.ie/~rkmoore/cyberjournal (USA Citizen)
* Non-commercial republication encouraged - Please include this sig *
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